NDP candidate Catherine Fife celebrates her stunning win of the K-W riding with party leader Andrea Horwath in September. Fife won more than 41 per cent of the vote and said the win still hasn't completely sunk in.

Fife wins in Waterloo

Chronicle Staff

Catherine Fife carried her steady campaign momentum through to a resounding win for the NDP in the Kitchener-Waterloo riding last night.

“Tonight we are all a part of history,” she told the crowd at her victory party.

Fife thanked the voters and the 700 volunteers who worked with her.

“I want to thank them for their trust and I can’t wait to go to Queen’s Park for Kitchener-Waterloo,” she said.

“This is a breakthrough, and for every candidate who has ever run for the NDP, this is a victory for them . . .When people said it can’t be done, we challenged that thinking and we out-worked, out-organized and we out-delivered.”

Fife won with about 41 per cent of the vote, compared to 31 per cent for Progressive Conservative Tracey Weiler and 24 per cent for Liberal Eric Davis.

Fife has been a high-profile public school board trustee since 2003. She first took a run at the Kitchener-Waterloo MPP seat in 2007, coming in third.

In his concession speech, Davis said he was proud to run on Premier Dalton McGuinty’s record and his vision for the province.

“This byelection was really about choosing strong local representation, and my hat’s off to Catherine Fife,” he said.

Earlier this week, Emmett Macfarlane, assistant professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, said a Fife win would be a tremendous breakthrough for the NDP in the riding.

“Catherine Fife has done a really great job to transform this into a three-way race. If you look at recent elections, of course we had Elizabeth Witmer representing the riding for quite some time, but even those races have generally just been competitive between the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberal party,” he said.

“The NDP has tended to be a distant third, and so this would be a tremendous steal for the NDP in that regard. And I think in this instance, it would have to do with a pretty positive campaign by Catherine Fife.”

PC Witmer held the seat for 22 years before stepping down in April. But the Kitchener-Waterloo riding, in its various incarnations, has never gone orange before.

The win snaps a six-election PC streak. Weiler’s 31 per cent was a mediocre showing compared to Witmer’s lowest percentage of 37 per cent in 1990.

“This election was full of surprises,” Weiler said in her concession speech.

“Up until the very last minute, it could have gone either way.”

But the effects of Fife’s victory might be even more significant for Premier Dalton McGuinty.

The Liberals kept their seat in Vaughan, also the site of a byelection yesterday. But the loss by Davis in Kitchener-Waterloo means the party is right back where it started — one seat shy of a majority.

“You don’t want to overstate the significance of one byelection in the broader scheme of things,” Macfarlane said.

“It’s not necessarily a stamp of legitimacy or not of the McGuinty government itself. But of course it has really important practical implications.”

Fife took a leave from her position as chair of the Waterloo Region District School Board and as president of the Ontario Public School Board Association to run her campaign. Now that she’s headed to Queen’s Park, she’ll resign from both positions.

“People in Ontario want positive change,” NDP leader Andrea Horwath said last night. “They want to elect someone they can rely on and trust. We know who that person is.”